Standard Life Investments a annoncé qu’il avait procédé, pour le compte de son fonds immobilier britannique, à l’acquisition à Sheffield d’un parking pour un montant de 13,8 millions de livres. La poche de cash revient ainsi à 13% contre 19% précédemment.

Au 1er novembre, LV= Asset Management (LVAM) a recruté Liz Adnitt comme investment sales director. Elle était depuis quatre ans chez SVN Asset Management où elle avait la responsabilité des clients discrétionnaires et intermédiaires pour Londres et la région Sud-Est de l’Angleterre. Elle se concentrera sur la clientèle discrétionnaire de la région londonienne, sous la direction de Matthew Wright, head of sales.Ce recrutement fait suite à ceux, en octobre, de Ben Rumary, investment sales manager pour Londres et le Sud de l’Angleterre, et de Roland Bagnall comme sales support executive.

Martin Currie vient d’ouvrir son nouveau fonds Amérique latine aux investisseurs britanniques. Le Martin Currie Latin America Fund est géré par Jeff Casson, qui était le gérant principal entre 2006 et 2010 du OEIC Amérique latine de Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (Swip).Ce nouveau fonds de convictions sera investi sur 35 à 55 actions représentant les meilleures idées du gérant. Ce dernier n’a pas de contraintes géographiques, ni sectorielles, et utilise une stratégie multi-capitalisations, orientée sur la croissance avec une gestion «bottom-up» . Le fonds se focalisera sur le Brésil, le Mexique, le Chili, la Colombie, le Pérou et l’Argentine.L’investissement minimal est de 1.000 livres pour la part retail et de 1.000.000 livres pour la part institutionnelle. Les frais de gestion annuels sont de 1,5 % pour la part retail et de 1 % pour la seconde. Les frais d’entrée ressortent à 5 %.

Man Group has decided to start selling its Man AHL Trend Fund to Singaporean retail investors, says hedgeweek. It is a first for the hedge fund manager. The fund employs a UCITS-III structure.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Thomas Olbrich, a senior fixed income portfolio manager at Oppenheim KAG, where he was in charge of several open-ended and institutional bond funds, has joined Gothaer Asset Management (GOAM) as a senior portfolio manager. He will be in charge of the fixed-income derivatives allocation for open-ended funds from GOAM and the investments of the insurer Gothaer Versicherung.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } According to financial industry sources, the Lampe private bank (Oetker group) backed out shortly before the deadline set by Deutsche Bank (Friday, 5 November) for firm bids to acquire BHF-Bank (1,500 employees, EUR40bn in assets), the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reports. For the moment, it is not yet known what the attitude of the private equity investor KKR, which was teamed up with Lampe and was supposed to provide most of the financing, will be. However, it appears that as the other potential buyers (Hinduja and Apollo) have also backed out, LGT-Bank remains as the only candidate. It would appear, however, that the bank owned by the royal family of Liechtenstein is only interested in BHF’s asset management and wealth management, and not its business banking and proprietary trading activities.

One year ago, Ignis Asset Management announced plans to develop its network of asset management boutiques, which then consisted of three entities. Since then, the Scottish asset manager has changed its approach. Now, it is planning rather to focus on its own investment teams, a more profitable strategy, says Philip Goldsmith, managing director Europe. That could also be based on a multi-boutique model, but this time, an internal one.To achieve this, Ignis AM has recently hired several big names in investment. Most recently, Mark Lovett, former chief investment officer at Allianz RCM for UK and European equities, joined the firm as chief investment officer (CIO). The arrival follows that of Chris Fellingham, formerly of Soros, who became chief investment officer. Other recruitments will follow. Ignis AM is seeking to strengthen its staff for international bonds.At the same time, the Scottish asset management firm has partially pulled out of the capital of Hexam, a joint venture in which it held 50%, with a sale of 15% to its partners. Now, it will no longer provide distribution of the firm’s products. The asset management firm will, however, retain a 35% stake in the company, as well as 50% stakes in its other boutiques, Argonaut, a specialist in European equities, and Cartesian, dedicated to UK equities, whose funds it will continue to sell.For Ignis AM, the objective underlying this strategy is development of third parties business. Of the firm’s EUR81bn in assets under management as of 30 September 2010, nearly 90% are still managed for its shareholder Phoenix, which is a British life insurance group.To get there, in addition to reinforcing its investment staff, the asset manager wants to move in three directions commercially, Philip Goldsmith explains to Newsmanagers. The first is to develop retail activities in the UK. The second is European expansion. A sales team from New Star has been recruited to cover continental Europe. Lastly, Ignis AM is also hoping to develop in the institutional segment. A team which will be based in London will soon be hired for this. In terms of European development, the team recruited in September had a difficult first year, facing a hard context. “Europe and equities are the two Lipper sector which have suffered most,” says Goldsmith. Ignis’ product range now consists largely of equities, mostly European.Hence the interest in broadening the product range. The firm is in the process of transforming a global emerging markets equities fund, which will be managed with a macro-economic approach. Goldsmith is also planning to sell UK funds from Cartesian, one of its boutiques. Other funds may also be launched in other asset classes.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Citywire reports that the former Threadneedle manager Rob Jones is preparing to launch his first fund at Union Bancaire Privée, his new employer. The fund will invest in European equities, and will be managed in the same way as the Threadneedle Pan European fund which he recently managed, the manager has told Citywire.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } In a notification to the CNMV, Renta 4 has announced that its net profits for the first nine months of the year increased 9.1% compared with the corresponding period of last year, to EUR5.1m, on earnings up 9.8% to EUR45.3m. The increase in assets observed in the past few months has continued, putting assets under management or administration as of 30 September at over EUR5.09bn, due to net subscriptions of EUR293m since the beginning of the year.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } The European Commission on 5 November launched a consultation on credit ratings agencies. “It became apparent during the debt crisis which affected the Euro zone that a re-examination of certain aspects of the regulatory framework may be necessary. There are increasing concerns that financial establishments and institutional investors are relying excessively on external ratings to the detriment of internal evaluation of credit risks, which could lead to market volatility and instability of the financial system,” the Commission says in a statement. The deadline to respond to the consultation is 7 January 2011. In the chapter on improving ratings of sovereign debt, the Commission proposes that agencies should be required to inform countries three days before ratings of their sovereign debt are to be altered. The consultation document also addresses excessive confidence placed in ratings by agencies, conflicts of interest for the thee major ratings agencies that have a stranglehold on the market, and the possibility of introducing a civil responsibility regime as part of the European Union’s regulatory framework which would be applicable to ratings agencies.

UBS has poached three employees from J.P. Morgan private bank to strengthen its wealth management offering in Asia, says FinanceAsia. Elan Cohen has joined as managing director. Rizvan Baig becomes executive director. And Matthew Peh is associate director.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } In its quarterly report, the Canadian firm Manulife has announced that net subscriptions to mutual funds from John Hancock in the United States totalled Usd2.3bn in third quarter, and USD7.2bn in the first nine months of the year, topping the total for 2009. As of 30 September, assets in these funds totalled USD31.6bn, 23% more than one year earlier.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } In third quarter 2010, Berkshire Hathaway, the firm controlled by Warren Buffett, saw a decline in its net profits to USD2.99bn, down from USD3.24bn in the corresponding period of last year, which still allowed the total for the first nine months of the year to increase to USD8.08bn, from USD5.54bn. Operating profits, for their part, increased to USD2.79bn in July-September, compared with USD2.05bn in third quarter 2009, putting profits for January-September at USD8.08bn, compared with USD5.54bn. Currency effects due to a weak US dollar and low interest rates provoked losses on the derivatives portfolio, which were partly offset by positive effects of the integration of Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF), which contributed USD706m in profits in July-September (and USD1.56bn since its consolidation in February). Losses on derivatives represented USD95m for third quarter, and USD1.24bn in January-September.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } In the first nine months of the year, the French private bank Neuflize OBC has posted net subscriptions of EUR2.183bn. “These results exceed our objectives set at the beginning of the fiscal year of net inflows of EUR2.047bn for the year 2010 as a whole, compared with EUR1.526bn in 2009,” a statement says. The bank projects that by the end of the year it will have net inflows higher than its budgetary projections. Fort the year as a whole, net banking proceeds are expected to total EUR300m, compared with EUR272m in 2009, while net profits are expected to top EUR30m, compared with EUR24.1m in 2009. Operating costs will be in line with the anticipated EUR244m.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } The US management firm Oppenheimer has announced the recruitment of Mark Anderson as managing director in the fixed income sales & trading department. Anderson previously worked at Stone & Youngberg and Merrill Lynch. Oppenheimer has also recruited Neil Snoep as director and banking strategist. In his new role, he will be in charge of strategic and tactical recommendations, quantitative analysis and active/passive management. He previously worked at Sandler O’Neill Partners, JP Morgan and Lehman Brothers.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Since the beginning of the year, according to Bloomberg reports cited by Cotizalia, Clarium Capital Management, the hedge fund firm founded by Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has seen losses of 17.1%. His fund Clarium LP (USD347m) lost 1% in October, while hedge funds earned an average of 1.1%. Since 2008, when they peaked at USD7bn, assets at Clarium CM, a global macro specialist, have consistently been on the decline, and most recently stood at USD742m.

MatlinPatterson, a USD9bn asset management firm specialising in distressed assets, is hiring a credit investment team which used to work for KeyCorp, the US bank, people familiar with the matter said according to the Financial Times. The team, headed by Craig Ruch, is expected to invest in corporate credit and municipal debt.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } For the third quarter and the first nine months of 2010, Prudential Financial has announced net profits of USD1.17bn and USD2.5bn, respectively, compared with USD1.09bn and USD1.62bn in the corresponding periods of last year. Operating profits for asset management activities increased to USD148m for July-September, compared with USD29m for third quarter 20009, bringing the total for January-September to USD355m, compared with USD61m. Assets under management by the asset management division as of 30 September totalled USD518.1bn, compared with USD443.9bn one year previously. For the group as a whole, assets totalled USD750.1bn, compared with USD640.9bn, in addition to which come assets of administration clients totalling USD100.8bn, compared with USD116.3bn. In total Prudential Financial had assets under management and administration of USD850.9bn as of the end of September, compared with USD757.2bn twelve months earlier.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } The Wall Street Journal reports that, according to sources familiar with the matter, the SEC is investigating losses from bond funds at the broker Smith Barney, which was at the time owned by Citigroup (before being sold to Morgan Stanley). The regulator is asking former brokers from Smith Barney, who have since been laid off, to testify. They accuse their former employer of misleading clients about the level of risk for its MAT Finance (municipal arbitrage trust) and Falcon (municipal bonds, bank loans, MBS) funds, products for which leverage was as high as 8, and which lost 77% in March 2008. The funds raised USD2.8bn between 2002 and 2007, from investors with at least USD5m in investable assets. Citigroup then partly reimbursed these subscribers, bringing their total losses down to 61%.

State Street Corporation has been appointed by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board of Ontario (WSIB) to provide a full range of investment services for its Pension Fund, Loss of Retirement Income Fund and Insurance Fund totaling CAD$15 billion in assets.The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board administers Ontario’s no-fault workplace insurance plan for workers and employers and oversees the province’s workplace safety education and training system. State Street will provide custody, accounting, securities lending and investment analytics services across the three funds.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Aberdeen Immobilien KAG announced on 5 November that its suspension of redemptions from the real estate funds DEGI International (open-ended, EUR17bn) and Global Business (institutional, EUR0.3bn) have been extended for a further 12 months, until 16 and 11 November 2011, respectively. In both cases, the available liquidity is not enought to meet expected or announced redemptions. The asset manager says that it will be “intensively” pursuing negotiations to sell properties in order to get the necessary liquidity to open the funds to redemptions again, but that improvement in the real estate market is still too fragile to permit sales before next year. The objective is to sell at adequate prices. The asset management firm was also recently obliged to announce a liquidation of the DEGI Europa fund over three years (see Newsmanagers of 25 October) due to inability to sell enough properties to keep up with redemption demands for the EUR1.3bn fund. Aberdeen Immobilien says that the occupancy rate for properties in the portfolio is 97% for the DEGI International and 93% for the DEGI Global Business, which is a sign of the good quality of the portfolio.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } On 4 November, Global X Management Company listed the Global X Gold Explorers ETF, which charges fees of 0.65%, on the NYSE-Arca platform, under the acronym GLDX. The fund replicated the Solactive Global Gold Explorers index, developed and calculated by the German management firm Structured Solutions, based in Frankfurt, in cooperation with Commodity Capital, in Zurich. The fund was created on 11 March 2010. The portfolio includes 30 positions on shares in gold mining companies whose projects are not yet at the production stage, but in the feasibility study stage with financing not yet complete. Currently, the index consists 70.3% of Canadian firms, 17.83% of US equities, 9.6% Australian and 2.27% Hong Kong shares. On 5 November, Global X also added to trading on the NYSE-Arca platform the first ETF of producers, refiners, prospectors and makers of equipment for the Uranium sector, the Global X Uranium ETF (acronym URA), which carries a management commission of 0.69%. The benchmark is the Solactive Global Uranium fund, which includes shares in 23 firms (compared with 20 as of the end of June), 50.45% Canadian, 31.26% Australian, and 13.55% American. The fund was created on 11 March 2010. The two new ETFs are distributed by SEI Investments Distribution.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } On 5 November, CBT Gestion (see Newsmanagers of 29 September) opened subscriptions for its first product, the FCP CBT action euro vol 20, a UCITS-compliant fund of funds which uses an active version of minimisation of variance (minvar) techniques. As Christian Bito, former managing partner at Rothschild & Cie Gestion, who manages the new products with Vladimiar Danesi, former director of multi-management at Rothschild & Cie Gestion, explains, the objective is to control the volatility of investments and seek performance in “corrugated iron” markets. The fund aims to beat the performance of the Eurostoxx 50 index over rolling 5-year periods. The principle developed by CBT Gestion is to set a risk budget and then to manage investments in order to control it. Risk, either measured by volatility or by value at risk (VaR), has virtually doubled. An investment in European PEA equities now has an average volatility of 24%, compared with 12% in 2006. For the FCP, CBT Gestion is offering shares for institutional investors with EUR100,000, and an R share which is eligible for PEA investment at EUR100; the latter shares are also on sale from Sélection R, Swiss Life and soon, AXA-Thema.

Hedgeweek has attended the launch of the Value Gold ETF at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. This is the world’s first physical ETF where the underlying gold bullion is held in Hong Kong and not in places like Zurich. It is the second ETF to be launched by Sensible Asset Management Hong Kong, a joint venture between Value Partners Group and Ping An.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Standard Life Investments has announced that for its British real estate fund, it has acquired a parking garage in Sheffield for GBP13.8m. This brings the fund’s liquidity down to 13% from 19% previously.

Martin Currie gives UK investors access to its new Latin America fund. The Martin Currie Latin America Fund is managed by Jeff Casson, who has 10 years’ investment experience. From January 2006 until May 2010, Jeff was lead manager of the Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (Swip) Latin American Oeic. The new high-conviction fund holds between 35 and 55 best ideas, is unconstrained at country and sector level, and employs a multi-cap, growth-oriented, bottom-up strategy. Its investment focus is on Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, Peru and Argentina. Its benchmark is the MSCI Latin America 10/40 index. The minimum investment is GBP1,000 for the retail ‘A’ share class and GBP1,000,000 for the institutional ‘B’ share class. The annual management charge is 1.5% for the ‘A’ share class and 1% for the ‘B’ share class. The initial charge is 5%.

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } As of 1 November, LV= Asset Management (LVAM) has recruited Liz Adnitt as investment sales director. She had spent four years at SVN Asset Management, where she was in charge of discretionary and intermediated clients for the London and South-East England regions. She will concentrate on discretionary clients in the London region, and will report to Matthew Wright, head of sales. The recruitment follows those of Ben Rumary, investment sales manager for London and South-East England, and Roland Bagnall as sales support executive, in October.

Alain Krief, responsable de la gestion globale crédit benchmarkée, BNP PAM

Le nouveau propriétaire investira 2,4 millions d'euros par chambre, un coût comparable à celui engagé pour les autres palaces parisiens en rénovation

Le spread 10 ans entre l'Irlande et l'Allemagne a atteint 523 pb, contre un seuil de 450 pb qui sert d'indicateur de risque chez LCH.Clearnet